


Colette's Rose

by cherryblossomriot



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Dean Winchester Can't Cope, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt Dean Winchester, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Mentioned Rose Tyler, The Doctor Loves Rose Tyler, The Doctor on His Own
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:08:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23069731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherryblossomriot/pseuds/cherryblossomriot
Summary: In between companions and left to wander the ends of the Universe on his own once more, the Doctor finds himself seated at an American bar, with one annoyed bartender, one water, and one mysterious stranger dowsing his miseries in whiskey. After striking up a conversation, they discover that they both share a joint sense of loss, and though they don't speak long, they both leave with a small understanding of the other.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Tenth Doctor & Rose Tyler
Comments: 1
Kudos: 41





	Colette's Rose

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! This is just kind of just an idea that came to me one night, and then did not leave until I jammed it out on a keyboard. The Doctor (David Tennant) is pre-season 4, meeting an early season 13 Dean Winchester (in between the time that Castiel died and came back).

The Doctor didn’t frequent pubs. Or bars, if you like. Or smimoras, as the ancient Galdaffi referred to them. He didn’t much care for alcohol, the taste was dreadful-unless it was a margarita, he was a sucker for those-and the effect it usually had on him, well, he already acted half drunk most of the time, so there was really no need for it. And the other aspect of a pub or bar or smimora, the social aspect where people united to either smash themselves silly or jointly wallow in their separate misery, didn’t really appeal to him either. While sure, it was an utterly and entirely  _ human _ prospect, to find company in isolation, it wasn’t the thing that always drew his eye when he was looking for humanity. He’d rather be on the run, either to or from anything at all, he was always running, running, running. Even when he stopped, he didn’t really. Adventure was around every corner, tucked in every crevice, hovering in ceilings and crouching in basements and towering above the sky. He loved what he did, he loved helping and saving people and opening their eyes to the prospect of  _ more _ . He just never hung around long after he did all that. So really, he had no reason to visit any pub at all, because he wasn’t asking anyone out for drinks, he was asking them out for the ends of the universe, and he wasn’t going to just sit and forget everything, he was going to  _ run  _ and forget everything, and he wasn’t going to drink until he was on top of the world, when he could just  _ be on top of the world.  _ And that’s why he didn’t understand why the TARDIS had set him down next to one. It was bizarre, really (and he’d seen quite his share of bizarre). At first, he’d exited the TARDIS sprinting. He was in between companions, Martha had decided to split and he couldn’t really blame her, so he told himself he was running  _ to _ someone new, and not  _ from  _ the memory of someone old. The door to his beautiful blue time machine had opened with a satisfying creak, one that he’d come to associate with magic and adrenaline, because really, everytime he stepped outside, that’s what happened, but instead, he’d come face to face with the dingy, damp, and dirty face of an american bar, night air slapping him in the face with a mixed and oxymoronic taste of freedom and bondage. Behind the smudged and shadowed glass of the window glowed an Open sign, ominous in its neon glare. Surely, this was a mistake. He’d told the TARDIS Karaena, as in the big, translucent planet full of translucent people, but this was definitely on Earth. And, from the looks of it, the worst part of it too. Spinning around, he’d sprung back into the TARDIS with a slight admonishment to her consciousness. 

“No, this isn’t where I wanted to go,” he whined, giving her console an expression that managed to look confused, irritated, and worried all at once.

Flipping switches, switching flips, dialing spins, and spinning dials, he coerced her engine into roaring to life, and with a sense of relief, relaxed when he felt her disappearing and reappearing. 

“See? Was that so difficult?”

Bounding once more back out the door, he realized that he’d spoken much too soon. He was still in front of the bar. Letting out an undistinguished, wordless whine, he turned back to her, taking in her sweeping ceilings and rustic arches. 

“Why do you want me to be here? No, no, let’s go somewhere else,” he sighed, turning back to her console. 

It didn’t work the third time. And that’s when he knew to stop trying. Obviously, she brought him here for a reason, and even though he was too stubborn to acknowledge it the first two times, he would be utterly and positively stupid if he ignored her a third time. And if there was one thing the Doctor was not, it was stupid. 

So, sporting his trench, navy-blue suit, cherry red shoes, and a slightly begrudging attitude, he pushed himself back into the American evening. The shadows looked more like stains where they hugged the street, and briefly, the Doctor considered if he should wander, not go into the bar at all. But after a cursory sweep of the abandoned street, he noted that it had to be late enough for the bar to be open but everywhere else closed. Leaning forward and up on the balls of his feet, he hesitated. It wasn’t the kind of hesitation where one weighed whether or not to do something, with equal chance of doing either. It was the hesitation of one who’d already made up their mind, but didn’t want to rush into it just yet. He regarded the bar in more detail, taking in the dim silhouettes of the patrons already inside, the flickering lights of the overhead sign that read  _ Colette’s Rose,  _ with the ‘c’ blinking every five seconds and the twin t’s completely out. The Doctor tried not to think of the irony in the name and failed. 

Huffing, in annoyance or frustration, he didn’t know, the Doctor strode forward, lanky limbs working in a rare moment of somber coordination. The door opened with the soft jingle of a bell and a waft of alcohol, and instantly, the Doctor could practically see a cloud of inebriated misery hovering in the air. After that, the first thing he really noticed, that grabbed his eyes so quickly he’d have been surprised if it hadn’t been designed that way, was the artwork of a rose on the back wall. Painted directly onto the surface in strokes of deep, deep red-so red it was burgundy- was a white tipped rose, fully in bloom. At first glance, he thought it was vivid, alive, thriving. But the longer he looked, the more intricate details he noticed. The shredded parts of the petals, the wilting ends, the sinister thorns. The longer he looked, the more ominous and melancolic the image became, until he was glancing away, searching for anything else to grab his attention. He turned his attention to the inhabitants of the bar, as they were the ones he’d probably been dumped here to meet. Aside from the surly and detached bartender cleaning glasses behind the bar, there weren’t many patrons there. Maybe earlier in the night, when it had been the golden hour for bars, when students came to celebrate or singles came to mingle or couples came to date, maybe then it had been busier. But now, all that remained of a rose-tinted whirlwind was the sad stragglers. A trio conversed in conspiratorial whispers in the far corner, hunched into themselves in a way that very much closed them off from outsider influence, a dark haired woman sat by herself at a table, glaring at the enormous rose like it had personally offended her, and really, the Doctor sympathized with her, and a man hunched over a glass of whiskey at the bar like he’d sworn a blood oath to protect it. His head, dropped so low his forehead could have met the rim of the glass in an unconventional kiss, looked weighted on his bunched shoulders, and his elbows rested on either side of the glass, boxing it in and keeping it from the rest of the world. For a moment, the Doctor simply stood there, knowing he had an abundance of options, but unsure of which one was the right one, the one that was supposed to happen. The axis of the world beneath his feet felt very present then, the way it spun, very fast but excruciatingly slow at the same time, hurtling through the cosmos and staying still all at once, was prevalent and agonizing, and he wished that for once, he wasn’t the way he was. He wished he couldn’t feel the spin of the Earth, didn’t know astronomical secrets about the fabric of reality, didn’t have worlds or all this information and facts in his head that had all been useless in the end. He just simply wished he was one of them, these people, absorbed in their own minds and miseries, bemoaning simple woes, like taxes or global warming. And so, he made his choice.

Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he approached the bar and pulled out a stool a space away from the hunched in man, wanting to be close enough for conversation but not stifling. At the sound of the stool leg on the bar floor, the man glanced over without interest. He did a double take for a moment, his face turning ghostly before realization and then angry dismissal returned his coloring. The Doctor noticed, but said nothing, at least, not yet. 

“’Ello,” he told the bartender, cheeky grin already smirking its way across his face.

The bartender, a tall woman in a tight tank-top that showed off her impressive arm muscles sent him a tired, discontent look, as if his energy only sucked more life out of her. 

“What can I get ya?” she asked in a drawling accent, easing her hands on her hips. A dark tattoo of thorns encircled her right bicep. 

“Wouldn’t suppose you have a lemonade? Or a Pastis? I love me a good Pastis, really hits the spot when you’ve had a long hot day. Although, has it been a long hot day? I only just got here. That’d be pretty awkward if it hadn’t. In that case, it’d be cold-well, it wouldn’t necessarily be cold, climate’s sort of tricky that way,but if it were cold I’d have a nice cup of ginseng tea, that’d  _ really _ set me up. Do you have any of that then?” 

He knew he sounded both idiotic and pretentious. He didn’t really care. 

The bartender, impossibly, looked even more tired. 

“No, we don’t.”

“Alrighty then,” the Doctor leaned back in his stool, hand gripping the counter for support. 

“I suppose I’ll have...one water.”

She blinked at him. Then shrugged and went about making him a water. The Doctor assumed she’d heard stranger requests from stranger people. 

“You come into a bar at hell o’clock in the morning and just ask for water?” The guy next to him asked, tone disguising suspicion under basic curiosity and interest. 

“Well, no where else was open,” The Doctor reasoned with him. 

The man looked at him, long, hard, analytically. It was obvious to the Doctor that the whiskey in his hands was definitely not the first he’d had tonight, or maybe even the fifth, but despite being under a numbing haze of alcohol, he managed to look at the Doctor with intensity and sobriety of any soldier evaluating a threat. It was chilling and disconcerting all at once, and immediately, the Doctor knew that this man was why he was here. The stranger’s face was almost as off putting as his gaze, sunken and sallow, it gave the look of someone who’d lost a good amount of weight in a much too short of time, like his skin was sucking itself back into his skull. His cheekbones were pronounced, his eyes rimmed with the stains of lost-sleep. It was the face of a man who’d lost something-everything. After a moment of stark silence, the man seemed to decide something, and shrugged, turning back to his glass. 

“Here you are, one water,” the bartender’s voice was hollow, the Doctor could hear how badly she wanted to go home. 

“Oh, ice! I love ice. You Americans always have such novel ideas, putting frozen water in normal water to cool it, brilliant,” The Doctor praised, bringing the glass, packed with said ice, to his lips. 

The bartender had already retreated to the far end of the bar, the man beside him snorted.

“What?” The Doctor asked out of curiosity.

“Oh, it’s just, your accent reminds me of some people I used to know.”

“Oh, fellow Englishmen! Good people, I hope,” The Doctor took a sip of his cold water. 

The man seemed to find this funny, like there was a much deeper story to the whole thing, but most of it was untellable. 

“One or two were. Maybe. The others…” he shrugged, “They didn’t like America much.”

“What’s not to like?” The Doctor burst, a bouncing ball of pure energy, “Football,Hollywood, Freedom, Ice! America’s a wonderful enigma of contradictions and oxymorons! Who wouldn’t find it fascinating?” 

“Them, apparently,” the man answered, bringing the glass of whiskey to his lips, closing his eyes, taking a slow, painful gulp.

“I’m the Doctor,” the Doctor cut straight to introductions, the man next to him too much of an intrigue to leave alone. 

Raising an eyebrow, whether in disbelief or amused acceptance, the stranger replied, “Dean.”

He didn’t offer a handshake. Which was good, because the Doctor didn’t want one. 

“Tell me, Dean, what were these Englishmen of yours like? Wouldn’t want to ruin your image of us forever.”

The Doctor found it funny that he said this, because in reality, he wasn’t even English at all. 

Dean smirked into his drink.

“One slept with my mom.”

“Ah.”

There really wasn’t much of a response for that. 

“Well, was he a nice bloke?”

“He was a dick,” Dean said back, not caring. 

Again, the Doctor was left speechless. Which didn’t happen much. In fact, he remembered one time, Jack had bet ten quid that he wouldn’t be able to stay quiet for a full ten minutes. He’d broken at thirty seconds, and blimey how Rose had laughed.

Rose.

Suddenly, the room grew thirty shades darker, like it was pulling the night in from outside. Sometimes, he was able to brush thoughts of her off, shove them down and focus on something else. Other times, she was all he could think about, and it was agony. The littlest things about her would resurface out of nowhere, and he’d find himself obsessing over them, losing his mind over them. Her smile, bright and cheerful and mischievous all at once, haunted him. The way she’d stick out her tongue when she was uncomfortable, or devious, or just plain excited, would hit him and leave him winded for weeks, spiralling and disoriented and less whole without her. The word  _ forever _ echoed in his mind, and he hated it, hated himself. Even when she’d said it, despite how badly he’d wanted it to be, he knew it would-could-never be true. It was impossible. He lived on, and on, he saw galaxies crumble and fade, stars appear and collapse, he saw empires thrive and turn on each other and on themselves, and she...she didn’t.

A huff beside him pulled him back to the bar and his haunted companion.

“You look like you’re regretting not getting something stronger,” Dean said after a sideways glance. 

The Doctor didn’t say anything yet, he didn’t trust himself to.

Dean shrugged, like he didn’t really care. But suddenly, the Doctor had a lot to say, and unfortunately for Dean, he was the only one listening. 

“Do you know why this place is called its name?” The Doctor wondered. 

“Huh?” Dean asked, surprised by the subject. 

“The name of the bar. Do you know why it’s called that?”

“I don’t even know what it’s called,” Dean mumbled lowly, “I usually don’t care.”

“Colette's...” The Doctor said helplessly, gesturing toward the painting on the wall. 

“You could ask the bartender,” Dean replied, completely uninterested. 

“I think I will. Excuse me?” The Doctor raised his voice, leaned forward to get her attention on him and instead of her bright red nails. 

It took him three tries before she finally looked up.

“Yeah?” She grumbled, then, remembering that she had to be somewhat pleasant to the patrons, added, “Can I help you?”

“Yes, the bar’s name. Why’s it called that?” The Doctor didn’t believe in coincidences. 

“Huh?  _ Colette’s Rose _ ? Oh, I don’t know, something about a woman during the civil war and her lost love.”

Both men flinched.

“Thanks,” The Doctor mumbled, suddenly nauseous.

“Yeah, no problem,” she replied, returning back to the furthest part of the bar and her nail inspection.

_ Why here?  _ The Doctor wondered, bothered by it all. The only thing that might have bothered him more was if this place had been called  _ Bad Wolf Brewery _ .

“Does it, uh, mean anything to you?” Dean wondered, trying to sound casual and failing miserably. 

The Doctor grew quiet, somber. He didn’t know why, but everything was pushing to spill from him at once, and before he knew what he was doing, he opened his mouth.

“I used to know someone named Rose.”

He could usually keep it together. Day to day, he could run and laugh and destroy evil plans and be an absolute genius, but whenever her name touched his lips it all fell apart. He hadn’t even known it was possible to say one name with such emotion behind it before he’d learned hers. 

Dean sent him a furtive glance, as if he sensed something within the Doctor that he was familiar with.

“Yeah?” He asked, looking at his whiskey and not at the suddenly emotional man beside him.

“Yes. She…”

How could he even begin? She made the universe feel small, she made the stars feel dull and boring, she made time stand still.

“Yeah,” Dean breathed, voice laced in matching solemnity. And then, the Doctor knew. Dean had lost someone too.

“She and I...we were good. Happy.”

The memory of her laughter, of the two of them being goofy and carefree and weightless, it felt so heavy. 

“I lost her a long time ago.”

Funny, how he grasped the concept of eternity better than most, how he’d lived for hundreds of years and known so many people, and yet the time without her felt like the longest of all.

Dean nodded. He finished his whiskey, signaled for another one.

There was silence, and then. 

“Do you mind taking off your trench coat?”

The question startled The Doctor enough to pull him out of his twisted revelry and gape at Dean. 

“What?” 

“Your trench coat. It’s just...I had someone like...like Rose. And he always wore one of those,” Dean gestured vaguely to the Doctor’s coat, pointedly looking forward and not at the Doctor.

“Oh, yes. Sorry,” The Doctor pulled it off without ceremony and shoved it precariously on the seat next to him.

“It’s fine. It’s just when you sat down, I thought you might be him.”

It was the Doctor’s turn to nod in somber understanding. 

“I see her everywhere,” he admitted. 

The bartender traded Dean’s old glass for a new one.

“It's amazing, you never realize how much they are, how much is a part of them, until…”

“Until they’re gone,” Dean finished for him, voice suddenly hard. Angry. 

“Yes.”

Dean pulled his new glass of whiskey to his lips, gazed into its swirling depths like he could see who he lost in them, and tipped his head back. When he placed the glass back on the counter top, it was empty, and he had officially crossed into lachrymose intoxication. Dean turned to face the Doctor, for the first time since he’d dissected his appearance, and almost turned back around. 

Laughing at himself, at the circumstances, at the world maybe, he said, “He used to wear blue suits too. Not as blue though.”

The Doctor raised his eyebrows, “It seems that we had very similar stylistic choices.”

Dean shook his head, whether to clear it or fight tears, neither of them knew. 

“He didn’t wear those, though,” he gestured to the bright red converse, then laughed to himself again. “Although knowing him, if he’d actually worn more than one outfit, he might have gone for shoes like that.”

Dean sounded like Rose, for a moment. 

_ “You only wear one outfit! Don’t you want more variety in your life?” _

_ “Are you kidding? I go to different planets every day, I think that’s quite a lot of variety, don’t you?” _

“What was his name?”

Because there must have been something...incredible about this man, that the loss of him completely derailed Dean, turned him into wreckage from the inside out. From what the Doctor could tell, Dean was a tough man, and destroying him so completely did not seem like an easy feat. Then again, Dean reminded him of every true soldier he’d ever met, and all of the were the same. Hardened on the surface, broken underneath.

“C-”Dean faltered, blinking. He tried again, but was still caught on the first consonant. 

“It was last week.”

The change of subject did and didn’t surprise the Doctor. Dean’s wounds were fresh, the Doctor’s had scabbed over.

“Never mind, no need to tell me,” the Doctor waved his hand, remembering how hard it had been to say her name to Donna, just after he’d lost her.

“Funny, huh?” Dean slurred, “That we came here.  _ Colette’s Rose _ .”

Dean snorted, like there was something ironic about that name for him too.

Before the Doctor could reply, Dean was laughing, unhinged.

“Someone once told me a story about a Colette. She loved this man, a monster really. She loved him unconditionally, and when he told her how awful he was, when she really saw him and knew all the things he’d done, she hadn’t left him. Only asked him to stop.”

The Doctor said nothing. It felt like Dean was building to something, leading to somewhere. 

“C-Cas was like that.”

Something inside the Doctor fell loose, spiraling into a void that he didn’t know the depths of. Rose had never known everything about him. He’d never told her about Gallifrey, about all the innocent lives he’d destroyed, ended. But he had a feeling, she’d have loved him anyway. 

“Then he was truly special.”

Dean nodded, and the mist in his eyes drew the Doctor’s attention to them. They were stunning, an unreal shade of green. But it wasn’t really their color that caught him, it was the kaleidoscope effect in them, fractured with memories. They looked old, and there was no way Dean could have been as old as him, but looking into his eyes, the Doctor wouldn’t have known it. Dean had broken eyes, shattered and splintered and left to continue breaking for as long as he lived, but there was a hardness beneath. A resolute sense of stubborn persistence that must have kept him alive this far. Except, even as the Doctor watched, that determination was breaking. 

“I...I lo-” Dean faltered, the words choking in his throat. He swallowed, pushed past it. 

“He never knew. I never told him. He died and I never told him.”

The Doctor leaned forward, understanding Dean’s pain more than any other could. 

“Neither did she.”

That got Dean’s attention. 

“She told me. It’s hard to explain, but she went somewhere that I couldn’t follow, and she told me. But I didn’t have a chance to say it back.”

For a moment, they simply sat there, a man completely wrecked inside and out, who’d seen hell and had lost the one thing that had pulled him out, and a Time Lord, ancient and lonely and devoid of a guiding hand to remind him of his humanity. 

“Can you...live without her?” Dean whispered it so softly, the Doctor wasn’t sure if he’d meant to say it at all. 

Devastatingly, the Doctor knew the answer. He knew it deep inside him, to his core being. In truth, he’d always known it. 

“Yes.”

The word’s departure physically hurt, and he felt somehow less without it. 

Dean looked away, at the other side of the bar, at his empty glass. 

For a moment, the Doctor thought that was it, the resolution to the conversation. He should have known better, he’d seen enough endings to recognize when there wasn’t one.

“I can’t.”

A beat. A sharp inhale of breath. The slow shudder of an exhale. 

“Without him, I mean. I can’t live without him.”

This was something that always fascinated the Doctor, the ability of humans to form such strong attachments-bonds-to each other. It really was remarkable how they would tear through reality and the ends of the universe for one another. Rose was like that. The Doctor wasn’t, and that shamed him. 

“This happened before,” Dean mumbled, “I’ve lost him so many times. But he’s always come back. He always comes back to me. And now, I think...maybe he’ll do it again. But I saw it happen, I saw the...light go out in his eyes. And there’s no hope.”

The Doctor didn’t want to torture this man more, but he couldn’t leave him, sitting there in a broken heap, and leave him without some semblance of hope.

“In my experience,” the Doctor started, “there’s always hope. And that’s usually what hurts the most.”

Dean didn’t react, instead he gazed right through the Doctor, as if, underneath the messy hair and suit, he could find someone else.

“I’ve been in situations like this before. I’ve lost so many people. But it never felt like this.”

The Doctor didn’t know what to say. Hesitantly, with a small bit of trepidation, he realized that while he loved Rose enough to at least try to let her go, Dean loved Cas enough to never let him go. Two sides to the same story. 

“My brother, Sam, he misses him too. But not as much as I do. Not like I do. And he doesn’t get why now...I can’t even look at-” Dean cut off. His moment of vulnerability vanished, not so much as shriveled away under the Doctor’s watch, but completely disappeared, hidden behind a wall of sheer emotional repression. 

“It doesn’t matter.”

The Doctor opened his mouth to argue, to say that it did indeed matter very much, but he was interrupted, by the sharp ring of Dean’s phone. 

“Hello?” Dean asked, instantly alert, on guard. “What do you mean you can’t find him? Dammit Sam you know what he could do-What? No, I’m not at a bar.”

There was a moment where Sam, presumably, voiced his abundant skepticism, and truly, the Doctor couldn’t blame him, seeing as Dean was lying through his teeth.

“No, I’m not drunk, I can drive.”

At this, the Doctor sincerely hoped he was kidding. 

“Shut up. I’ll walk then. Look, when did you last see him?” 

Another crackle of silence. 

“Dammit Sam, seriously? What have you been doing? Why didn’t you call me sooner? What did you think I was gonna murder him? Don’t answer that.”

The Doctor, again, was slightly concerned. 

“Alright, alright. Yeah. I’ll meet you there,” Dean sighed, dragging a weary hand down his whole face, and resting it against his chin. Hanging up, he breathed an exhausted swear into the thick bar air.

“I have to go,” he announced, standing up and tossing a wad of cash on the bar counter. 

The Doctor rushed to stand with him, scrambling to get out his next words. 

“Do you need help? Looking for your friend? I might be able to help, I’m very good at these sort of things.”

Dean didn’t bother to look back at him as he headed toward the door. 

“Thanks, but it’s better if you didn’t.”

The Doctor balked, halting in his steps. 

“Well, alright then.”

Dean paused, hand hovering over the door, waiting to push it open.

“I, uh, I’m sorry,” He said, “About Rose.”

The Doctor wasn’t expecting this, but nodded in grateful acceptance. Figuring that was the end of their discussion, and most likely the last time they’d ever meet, Dean nodded and turned away again, ready to leave the bar behind. 

“And I,” The Doctor said, thoroughly stopping Dean in his steps, “am sorry about...him.” 

He wasn’t sure if saying Cas’s name would ignite something in Dean, something violent and tormented, because the way Dean had said it, like a prayer, a confession, and an oath all at once, it was holy. Sacred. And someone else saying it didn’t have the same weight, the same spell. 

“Thanks,” Dean swallowed, staring resolutely on the floor. “I’m not the same without him.”

The admission left the Doctor cold. It was such a strange thing to say, at the end of their conversation, after everything else. But then he thought of the story of Colette, unendingly loving a monster, and the Doctor understood, maybe just a sliver. 

“Neither am I,” he agreed, thinking of the way he’d almost gone too far, almost let the world end so many times. Rose wouldn’t have liked it, she would have stopped it, and he'd listen. Because she loved him. Because she was his heart, even though he had two.

And that must have been what Cas was to Dean.

Dean nodded at that, satisfied, and straightened, like he'd unwittingly released a burden. Without another word, he pushed out the door, and left the Doctor behind, thinking maybe, he’d like a drink after all. 


End file.
